Top Posts & Pages

Twitter

Blog Stats

Imagine one day you’re running a business or sitting as a transport planner with one task in mind, how do I delivery my product in the right time and the most efficient way? This enigma is often related to one of the famous Vehicle Routing Problem, which is a combinatorial optimization and integer programming problem to achieve the optimal set of routes for a fleet of vehicles to traverse in order to deliver to a given set of customers. Of course nowadays you can easily solved this by utilizing a thousand dollar worth of software. But in this series of post, I’d like to take a basic view on how to solve this by using a simple spreadsheet tool. Continue reading Truck Routing Problem: Basic

I happen to see this mind reading video first at Facebook. One of my friend seem to be fascinated to how Rich Lax in his video guess correctly the number that we had in mind. In the video, we were told to pick a number from 1 to 10, and then he adds some mathematical operation instruction. At the end of his video, he predict the possible number using a group of shaped contained 3 possible number. Sound’s not pretty magical but, yeah, the audience cheering.

What really occurred is just a basic math. Using this spreadsheet tool, we try to figure the all possibility outcome.

In this simulation we able to see that every possible number of choice led into the outcome of either 4, 7, or 10. Although there’s a slight chance that you are a man and puck a number 8, which lead into the outcome of 13. But who care? Since there will be larger probability that among 1 to 10, you will pick more popular picks number such 7, 5, 1, or 9. Using this mini simulation and basic algebra, you can find countless other pseudo mind reading operation to impress with. After all, it’s nothing to do with mind reading.

The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity.
― Harlan Ellison